Vision Health
(Globe & Mail insert)
Coalition aims to improve vision awareness
`We came together in the NCVH because of you and me as potential patients and the need for eye care'
An urgent sense of common cause has brought together an unprecedented alliance of Canada's eye-care professionals.
With average waiting times to see an ophthalmologist in Canada exceeding half a year, and the prevalence of age-related eye disease soaring in an older population, spurring new models of care has become a defining mission for the National Coalition for Vision Health (NCVH).
"The situation in Canada is disturbing because we are faced today with a real problem of accessibility to care," says Dr. Raymond LeBlanc, Coalition chair and head of ophthalmology at Dalhousie University in Halifax. Five years of hard work by the Coalition team to elicit collegial commitment to tackling that issue have come to impressive fruition. Among others, Coalition partners today include The Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB) and its E.A. Baker Foundation for the Prevention of Blindness; the Canadian Ophthalmological Society; the Canadian Association of Optometrists; the Opticians Association of Canada; the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, educators, Assembly of First Nations, the Foundation Fighting Blindness and industry partners.
It was a 1998 Toronto conference titled The National Consultation on the Crisis in Vision Loss, organized under the auspices of the E.A. Baker Foundation, which proved the galvanizing event for creating the alliance. "The organizers brought together a wide variety of stakeholders all in the same room," recounts Charlene Muller, Coalition executive director in Toronto who came to the role after decades serving the CNIB.
"What came through to everyone," she continues, "was that waiting lists for care were so long that people's vision worsens from when they first are seen. There is a need to prioritize the people requiring care and move them along.
"The Coalition recognizes the need to launch national awareness campaigns about vision health issues. We still need to identify the real number of individuals in Canada with visual impairments."
The figure will be large. The current list of 105,000 clients of the CNIB as of December, 2001 is projected to double by 2015, while the leading cause of blindness in Canada, age-related macular degeneration (AMD), is surging as the population greys. "The CNIB and the Coalition are partners in trying to raise the profile of vision health," explains Dr. LeBlanc, whose home province of Nova Scotia has led the country with a first Comprehensive Vision Care Program that engages various eye-care professionals and family doctors as an interdisciplinary team. "This is a long-term effort."
The early signs in Nova Scotia, however, where the program calls for family doctors and optometrists to play a diagnostic and monitoring role for such conditions as diabetic retinopathy, referring patients to overworked ophthalmologists when necessary, are already very positive.
"I've talked to people in New Brunswick and PEI about this because those are also smaller provinces," Dr. LeBlanc reports. "In a very populated province like Ontario, we might look at this problem on a district level."
The Coalition does not maintain that all the answers are yet available, and even the model in Nova Scotia will evolve as implementation proceeds. But that greater public awareness, more political action and improved approaches to care are vital, is not in doubt.
"We came together in the National Coalition for Vision Health because of you and me as potential patients and the need for eye care," Ms. Muller says. "The fact is vision that has been lost cannot be restored."
